The growth of wireless networks has resulted in part from requirements for connecting people and advances in radio technologies. Recently there has been an increasing trend towards enabling the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Thousands of tiny devices interacting with their environments are being inter-networked and made accessible through the Internet. For that purpose, several communications protocols have been defined making use of the IEEE 802.15.4 Physical and MAC layers. The 6LoWPAN Network Layer adaptation protocol is an example which bridges the gap between low power devices and the IP world. Since its release, the design of routing protocolsbecame increasingly important and the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) emerged as the IETF proposed standard protocol for IPv6-based multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN).This thesis considers that the sensor nodes form a large IPv6 network making use of above technologies and protocols, and that the sensor nodes are enabled to run one or more applications. It is also assumed that the applications and the sensor nodes to which they are associated, are not always active, alternating between active and inactive states.The thesis aims to design a new energy efficient communications solution for WSN by exploring the hypothesis that the network is aware of the traffic generated by the applications running in the sensor nodes. Therefore, the thesis provides two major contributions: 1) a cross-layer mechanism using application layer and network layer information to constrainRPL-defined routing trees (RPL-BMARQ); 2) an Application-Driven WSN node synchronization mechanism for RPL-BMARQ.RPL-BMARQ is designed as an extension to the RPLrouting protocol using information shared by the application and routing layers to construct Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), allowing the nodes to select parents with respect to the applications they run. By jointly considering the neighbors of each node, the applications each node runs, and the forwarding capabilities of a node, we provide a communications solution which enables the data of every application and sensor node to be transferred, while keeping the overall energy consumed low by reducing the time the nodes are active and reducing the total number of multicast packets exchanged. Therefore, RPL-BMARQhelps reducing the network energy consumption since it restricts radio communication activities while maintaining throughput fairness and packet reception ratio high. The mechanism was evaluated using four scenarios with different network topologies and compared against "standard RPL". The results obtained show that the mechanism enables lower energy consumption since the nodes are more often put a sleep, reducing the total number of packets exchanged, while maintaining fairness and query success rates high.The Application-Driven WSN node synchronization mechanism for RPL-BMARQ was designed to maintain the sensor nodes synchronized according to the duty cycle of the applications they run. The mechanism jointly uses cross-layer information and the Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) technique for calculating in run-time average network delays which are used to control the time the sensor nodes would sleep in the next cycle in order to wake up just before the next activity period starts. This mechanism enables all the sensor nodes to go asleep and to wake up in synchronism. The mechanism was theoretically evaluated and simulated, and the results obtained show that the synchronization mechanism works as previewed. The results also showed that, when designing WSN applications with this mechanism, the nodes not involved in communications are kept sleeping as much as possible, waking up when necessary and in synchronism.In order to confirm the validity of the mechanisms designed, we also tested them in real environments where the results were confirmed.
展开▼
